Discovering the Brilliance of Hélio Oiticica

The Brazilian artist was sorely under-known in the U.S. while he was alive. A posthumous retrospective reveals the immersive pleasures of his work.

Oiticica’s “Bólides” on display in his garden in Rio de Janeiro, in the mid-sixties.

Courtesy Claudio Oiticica / Projeto Hélio Oiticica

I’m getting braver at saying the name of a sorely under-known Brazilian artist whose retrospective at the Whitney Museum, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” comes as an overdue revelation. Oiticica died in 1980, of a stroke, at the age of forty-two, after early success in Rio de Janeiro, a brush with fame in London, obscurity during seven years in New York, and a return to Rio that, at one opening, occasioned a riot. Along the way, he turned from superb abstract painting to innovative work in sculpture, film, writing, political action, and participatory installation, much of which remains as fresh as this morning. The sand, huts, potted plants, caged parrots, and inscribed poetry of his sprawling “Tropicália” (1968) await your barefoot delectation, should you choose to park your shoes in the rack provided. So do the multifarious love nests (mattresses, straw, chopped-up foam rubber, water) of a more austere faux beach, “Eden” (1969). Works that he made in New York and, at the time, showed only privately exalt sex, drugs, and rock and roll—delirium aplenty, yet managed with acute aesthetic intelligence. But back to the name. My pronunciation can still come out a little different every time, along a scale from the “Oy-ti-seek-a” recommended in the Times to the “Whoa-ta-cee-kah” that a self-confident Midwestern friend of mine swears by. I mention this because a tin ear for Portuguese makes me typical in an art world that, with exceptions, has long been inattentive to Latin America.

Oiticica was born in Rio in 1937 to an upper-middle-class and deeply cultured family. His father was a polymath engineer, mathematician, scientist, and experimental photographer whose own father, a philologist, published an anarchist newspaper. Oiticica spent two years in Washington, D.C., starting in 1947, while his father worked at the National Museum of Natural History. He devoured modern philosophy, favoring Nietzsche. Back in Rio, he wrote plays, studied painting, and, in 1955, joined a group of artists who were strongly influenced by European geometric abstraction. (This put them on a course alien to artists in the United States, where Abstract Expressionism—soon to be followed by Pop art and minimalism—sought to eclipse European modernism. The split proved enduring.) In hundreds of small paintings—too few, in the show, to sate my appetite for them—the young Oiticica rang startling changes, mixing homage and rivalry, on the styles of Mondrian, Malevich, and Klee.

By 1960, with like-minded compatriots including Lygia Pape (her own grand retrospective currently at the Met Breuer signals a corrective attention to Latin- American art), Oiticica had developed sculptural expansions of painting, with standing and suspended panels. Those led to his “Penetrables”—booths that could be entered—and “Bólides,” finely built wooden boxes with drawers or flaps that viewers could open to find various raw materials, mostly earthen. He took to frequenting Rio’s favelas, the direly impoverished hillside shantytowns that overlook the prosperous city. The improvisatory folk culture there inspired his “Parangolés”: garments for festive wear, mainly capes, that he stitched together from swaths and scraps of colorful fabric. With concerted study, he became an expert samba dancer. When, in 1965, Rio’s Museum of Modern Art barred entry to Parangolé-clad folk brought by Oiticica to dance at the opening of a show that he was in, the group disported outside in what became a legendary ad-hoc pageant. A military coup in Brazil in 1964 had ushered in a period of governmental oppression, which initially spared artistic activities. Needling of the junta by Oiticica and other artists—“Be an outlaw, be a hero,” he printed in black on a red banner with the image of a fallen youth—ended, in 1968, with a crackdown that drove many, including him, into exile. Like other aspects of his quicksilver character, his politics were ambiguous: leftist in general but what might be termed pop-aristocratic in effect. Jimi Hendrix became a guiding light to Oiticica at least as consequential as Marcel Duchamp.

“Creleisure,” Oiticica termed the principle of his sensual installation “Eden” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, in 1969. The idea of Dionysian pleasure-seeking as a creative and, somehow, politically meaningful pursuit was much in the air then. (An observer at the Whitechapel show, perhaps in the mood for an orgy, deplored the no-fun restraint of British viewers.) But Oiticica was too tough-minded to indulge in hippieish peace and love. “Sex and Violence, That’s What I Like,” he had lettered on one Parangolé. His gayness became a driving personal cause and may have figured in his move, in 1970, with funds from a Guggenheim grant, to post-Stonewall New York, where he took an apartment on Second Avenue in the East Village. He relished the round-the-clock bacchanal of the West Side piers, photographed hustlers, and filmed the drag star Mario Montez. But he disdained the commercially oriented scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory for, he said, “raising marginal activity to a bourgeois level.” Insuring his own marginality, he took to dealing cocaine, a drug that became something like the love of his life. He gave varieties of it poetic names: Snows of Kilimanjaro, for one, and Carol Channing’s Diamonds, for another. In an undated, lovely still-life photograph, a little heap of the intoxicant rests on a box of Bold laundry detergent.

I never met Oiticica, as far as I can recall, though he lived three short blocks from me and knew artists whom I knew—notably the dazzling Gordon Matta-Clark—in a scrappy SoHo milieu that was minuscule by today’s standards. I get to sample at the Whitney what (perhaps luckily for me in the long run) I missed out on in the hermetic scene that Oiticica hosted. “CC5 Hendrix-War” (1973) is a room equipped with six comfortable hammocks. Projected on the walls and ceilings are overlapping slides of the cover of “War Heroes,” a posthumous Hendrix album, from 1972, as its thrilling songs play from multiple speakers. On the cover, decorating Hendrix’s face like war paint, are lines of cocaine. Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned. The work’s form anticipates subsequent generations of installation artists, none of whom can beat it for immersive and bracing cogency. Of course, Oiticica’s blitzed afflatus was insane, as any former addict will tell you. After 1975, references to cocaine dwindled in his work.

Oiticica was a great one for planning. His buoyant writings in English, displayed in vitrines and seductively recited through earphones, hatch intricate Utopian schemes, often architectural in character. In 1971, he proposed one that involved labyrinthine spaces, for construction in Central Park, called “Subterranean Tropicália Projects.” Judging by the maquette in the show, I endorse reviving the idea. Oiticica’s feel for spatial arrangement and proportion, developed in his early painting and sculpture, is just about preternatural. Had he lived longer, we would likely be blessed with a number of landmark achievements in public art.

In 1978, weary of New York and of being harassed, for want of a green card, by U.S. immigration authorities, Oiticica returned to Rio. His last major work, “PN27 Penetrable, ‘Rijanviera’ ” (the title was taken from a coinage referring to Rio de Janeiro in “Finnegans Wake”), ends the Whitney show in a spirit of chastening ritual. Entering a pavilion that is made of translucent, subtly hued plastic panels, you wade through running water and emerge on soft sand, amid a rock garden. The work’s solemnity didn’t deter rowdies in 1979 who attended the show in Copacabana where it was introduced, incautiously augmented with blasting Hendrix music. When the installation’s water pump broke, flooding the gallery, a number of the viewers went wild, wrecking a nearby piece by Lygia Pape and forcing Oiticica to physically defend his own (he is said to have hit one vandal in the face with a rock). But the contretemps seems not to have marred his happiness at being back in Brazil—“free free free,” he wrote to a friend. When he died, he had a profusion of projects in development, and a future ahead of him that invites our imagining. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the July 31, 2017, issue, with the headline “Full Immersion.”

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”